Gene Wilder: a wild, inspired and sensitive actor who ran on rocket fuel

Gene Wilder was a smart, industrious and often very funny actor and writer who earned a slow-burn cult status as the weirdo chocolate mogul Willy Wonka in the Roald Dahl adaptation Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971).

His sharp, handsome face with intense blue eyes became more cartoon-like as he got older and he had a regular paycheck by teaming up with Richard Pryor in broad comedies like Silver Streak and Stir Crazy — a double-act which perhaps showed neither to his full potential. He also directed and adapted the 80s romantic comedy The Woman in Red, which got an Oscar for its hit Stevie Wonder tune, I Just Called To Say I Love You.

But his claim to fame lay in his partnership with his great comedy collaborator, Mel Brooks, effortlessly in tune with each other’s classic vein of American Jewish comedy. With Brooks he created three giant comic hits: The Producers (1967), Blazing Saddles (1974) and Young Frankenstein (1974). And the first of these is a masterpiece, whose resonance continues to this moment. Did Donald J Trump only run for office so he could increase his TV earnings potential? Is he making increasingly outrageous statements so that he will be released of a burden he never really wanted — and which may end in disastrous revelation of his tax affairs — only to find that his poisonous provocations only make him more loved? Did he get this idea from The Producers?

Gene Wilder plays Leo Bloom, the nerdy little accountant who comes to work for Max Bialystock, played by Zero Mostel (with a weird Trump-ish combover) a failed Broadway producer. Out of pure academic interest, Bloom notes that if Bialystock can persuade enough of his little-old-lady backers to put in far more money than he needs, and the show is a spectacular flop, then he can keep all the excess cash and never be investigated by his notional investors or the tax authorities.

Bialystock of course declares the idea to be pure genius, and they hit on the idea of a Hitler musical which naturally becomes a hit. Gene Wilder’s face is perfect: seething and wincing and gibbering with nerves and excitement, especially when he was reduced to a cringing mess of anxiety by being deprived of his childhood “blue blanket”. Wilder was far better than Matthew Broderick in the stage show, who didn’t have half the neurotic rocket-fuel that Wilder brought to the role. (I think Simon Helberg’s nervy pianist in Florence Foster Jenkins took a little from Wilder’s Leo Bloom.)

In the raucous spoof western, Blazing Saddles, Wilder plays legendary gunfighter Jim, who teams up with a black sheriff called Bart, played by the distinguished Shakespearian actor Cleavon Little, although the part was originally penciled in for Richard Pryor: the Wilder/Pryor partnership would only come into being later. As ever, good deadpan stuff from Wilder who was however rather upstaged by the uproarious setpieces — like the deafening “fart” medley — and also the other cast members, including veteran players Slim Pickens and Harvey Korman as the horribly corrupt politician Hedley Lamarr.

Wilder probably came into his own more with Young Frankenstein which he fully co-wrote with Brooks and which he put his stamp on. He is Dr Frankenstein, a modern-day neurophysiologist, tormented by the memory of his notorious grandfather and by his sense of destiny. Again, he was in danger of being a straight-man to huge comedy turns like Marty Feldman as Igor and Peter Boyle as the monster, but Wilder’s strange beady-eyed, frizzy-haired intensity always allowed him to dominate each scene in exactly the right way. He really did look mad.

The late 60s and early 70s were Gene Wilder’s moment, and perhaps he never quite equalled it later. But with Leo Bloom, Willy Wonka, Jim and Dr Frankenstein is a glorious quartet of comic performances.